Iceland’s got a lot going for it: fresh, clean air, perfect water, jaw-dropping scenery and gorgeous, gorgeous inhabitants. They don’t go in for comically death-defying fattening foods like we do here in the States. It’s not their style. But generally speaking, you can find better food in a pet store than you can in Iceland.

I’m exaggerating for comic effect here, of course. Having once learned the hard way that Gravy Train does not secrete anything close in flavor to real gravy when you add water, I do know the difference.

It’s just that because Iceland is so far away from everything and everyone else, and a country made of Arctic tundra, there’s no such thing as fresh local produce. Whatever is grown locally is grown in geothermal greenhouses and everything else has to be flown in from Europe. This drives up prices for pretty much everything on the island. And it makes for some seriously strange sandwiches that cost at least ten bucks. Like this one, snapped at a gas station outside of Vik:

I emailed a few Icelandic acquaintances, just to make sure I was reading the label correctly. That last letter isn’t one we have in English, and I wanted to make sure it wasn’t a cognate game-changer. They all wrote back, saying essentially the same thing: “Yep, that is a Bacon Nacho Sandwich.”
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Popularity: 3% [?]

There are no guardrails in Iceland. At Gullfoss, a waterfall taller than Niagara Falls and a major international tourist attraction, there is only a thin rope stretched at shin height around the edge of the rock 6 inches away from white pounding oblivion. The rock leading up to that rope — where all the best photos can be taken — has never been dry. It’s been slick with cold waterfall mist for thousands and thousands of years. That rope might a well be made out of dental floss for all the protection it’s offering.

Remarkably, nobody seems to mind. There are only 300,000 people in all of Iceland, and not many of those are lawyers. Our guide on a glacier tour said “all the guides in Iceland have a joke. We say that if you get into an accident and there’s an injured American lawyer in your group, just finish him off right there. Push him into a geyser or something and save us all the trouble of a long, drawn-out lawsuit.”

Our snowmobiling guide told us before we headed up onto the ice: “You may want to zig-zig on the ice on these things, maybe go real fast and spin around. I’m not telling you not to. What I am telling you is that only 2 meters away from this track are crevasses and ice holes that go down to the bottom of the glacier, and they’re really hard to spot. If you fall in, nobody will come after you and anthropologists will find your body in a few hundred years. If you don’t fall in, but your snowmobile does, you’re replacing the snowmobile. And if you think beer is expensive in Iceland, try replacing a snowmobile.”
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Popularity: 2% [?]

I look like a meth addict — my face is in terrible shape, and my liver’s not doing much better — but my soul is happier and more fulfilled than a python at a day-care center.

I got a cigarette burn on my left cheek at 4:30 this morning at a crowded bar in Reykjavik, 2 hours of sleep and a terrific case of windburn and sunburn while snowmobiling on Langjokull Glacier, followed by a horrific shave from an overpriced vending machine razor. I’ll explain more later, but leave you with this photo for now:

Popularity: 2% [?]